Unchanging climate in the literary world

Just a week before the unimaginable human tragedy in Kerala’s picturesque Wayanad region, I happened to view an animated film that was being shared on social media. It was a rendering of Malayalam writer Thakazhi Shivashankara Pillai’s short story, ‘Vellappokkathil’ (‘In the Flood’). It’s the poignant tale of a dog that is left stranded in a hut while his master and family escape in a rescue boat during a severe flood. The story captures the agony of the dog who endures the ravages of weather, pangs of hunger and the insensitivity of passing humans even as he guards his master’s hut. The backdrop to this tale of loyalty and resilience was the Great Flood of 1924, which had submerged much of Kerala and devastated India’s first monorail system in the tea gardens of Munnar. Exactly a hundred years later, a similar tragedy recurred in Wayanad. Landslides triggered by torrential rain and a swollen river that changed course erased three villages off the map.

Extreme weather patterns continue to wreak havoc, from flash floods and landslides in Himachal Pradesh and Uttarakhand to unprecedented rain in Delhi, Maharashtra and Assam. All this, after we witnessed one of the worst summers of all time. At the recent Paris Olympics, too, climate change was a talking point as the heatwave got to the athletes, prompting gymnast great Simone Biles to exclaim that it felt “like 9,000 degrees”. Climate change is a talking point when 200 mm of rain turns Dubai into a river, when fruit orchards shrink in the Himalayan region, or when photos of a rapidly melting Swiss glacier take the Internet by storm. In other words, the perils of climate change are no longer a distant possibility but an everyday reality. But have we come to grips with it, or much less, do we fully grasp its import?

Many Indian writers have penned cautionary tales about environmental loss, ecological imbalance and human greed. Mahasweta Devi addressed this in her Bengali novella ‘Pterodactyl, Puran Sahay and Pirtha’ (1995), where the prehistoric flying reptile warns, “We are extinct by the inevitable natural geological evolution. You too are endangered…. Forests extinct, animal life obliterated outside of zoos and forest sanctuaries. What will you finally grow in the soil, having murdered nature in the application of man-imposed technology?” In similar vein, Arun Joshi’s 1990 novel, ‘The City and The River’, is a fable that is a critique on autocracy as well as on environmentalism and the destructive consequences of development. More recently, Janice Pariat’s ‘Everything the Light Touches’ is an exploration of the human understanding of nature and ways in which the bond can be forged.

But perhaps the one writer who has consistently engaged with climate change and been vocal about it is Amitav Ghosh. In ‘The Hungry Tide’ (2004) and ‘Gun Island’ (2019), where the Sundarbans is both the backdrop and life-force of the narrative, he captures the fragility of the mangrove ecosystem as well as its fury when threatened by man-made interventions. ‘The Living Mountain’ is another allegorical wake-up call to climate reality. A few years ago, Ghosh had lamented that the literary world had not taken enough cognisance of this reality. In his book ‘The Great Derangement’, Ghosh wrote that the very mention of climate change was enough to relegate a novel or a short story to the genre of science fiction. “It is as though in the literary imagination, climate change were somehow akin to extraterrestrials or interplanetary travel… if the urgency of a subject were indeed a criterion of its seriousness, then, considering what climate change actually portends for the future of the Earth, it should surely follow that this would be the principal preoccupation of writers the world over — and this, I think, is very far from being the case.”

While one may not agree that science fiction deals only with interstellar explorations or apocalyptic scenarios, Ghosh may have a point about how mainstream fiction can no longer afford to sidestep the realities of climate change. “The real story,” concedes acclaimed science fiction writer Kim Stanley Robinson, “is the one facing us in the next 30 years.” In fact, Robinson’s much-talked-about book, ‘The Ministry for The Future’, opens with a deadly heatwave that kills millions in India. If it sounds ominous, one can only hope that fiction doesn’t meet reality.